We made the mistake back in October of promising online multiplayer for Lance A Lot. We made the promise without knowing fully what it would take to implement it, and without letting ourselves have enough time to think it through. We shouldn’t have promised it. But we did, and now here we are.
We have realized that there is just no way that we can live up the expectations and create the experience people would want. Online multiplayer in our development build has network issues that are fundamental to how the game is built. To fix it we would have to rewrite most of the movement and physics code in the game, and we would also have to redesign the core gameplay to be less dependent on physics and exact hit detection.
There is also the issue of sustaining a community over time. Lance A Lot lacks the depth and variation necessary to keep player’s interest for long. It’s fun for what it is as a local multiplayer game, but we think people would want so much more from an online game than what Lance A Lot provides.
Beyond that, there are also other projects that we really want to do. Games that we think you would like more than Lance A Lot. We never planned to invest nearly as much time into this game as we have. It was originally a short 3-month project that we wanted to make as a way to gain experience before we started something bigger, and to show publishers that we can actually ship games (which is essential to make any form of deal). We have now spent nearly 9 full-work months developing the game (over a 13-month period). And we still have a few more months of work that we must do for the console release. Cutting online and the work we have invested in it is not fun, but it is necessary.
In the long-term, we think it would be better both for us and the community if we made a game designed for online from the start. A game with the depth and content necessary to keep people interested over time. We also feel that there are lots of stuff we can do with the concept of rocket jousting that we never got to explore in Lance A Lot. Unfortunately, we skipped pre-production and proper planning when we started development since it was supposed to be such a short project, so most of the good ideas came too late to be implemented. At some point in the future though, we would like to explore those ideas in the form of a sequel or a spiritual successor. But that’s for another day.
Just to be clear, this means that we have decided to cancel online multiplayer altogether for Lance A Lot.
We are sorry to disappoint you.
Why promise online in the first place?
Online multiplayer has been the most requested feature by far throughout development. Both by people we have met during events and by people online. And especially during release. At launch we believed that we could add it fast enough that it would still be worth it, but that has obviously not been the case.
And what have you been up to these past few months?
First of all, keep in mind that none of us worked full-time between the October release and early February. Since February though, I’ve worked full-time as designer and Erik has worked full-time as programmer. The rest of the team works part-time as 3D artists. That’s why progress has been so slow until recently.
From November to mid-January, we focused entirely on implementing online. By the end of January however, we had to start working on the Xbox One version as Microsoft had asked us to exhibit the game at GDC. Getting it to run at above 60 fps on console (and still look good) required a lot more time than expected. And once we had already spent the entirety of February optimizing the game for console we realized that it made more sense to just finish the console version and release it, rather than postponing the launch for online.
Why not reveal sooner that online was cancelled?
We wanted to wait until we had something positive to show as well. For example, earlier today we posted this video update. Hopefully in the coming weeks we will be able to show new stuff on a somewhat regular basis.
So what are you actually planning to do?
Considering our inability at keeping promises, we would prefer to not promise anything right now. Instead of talking about upcoming stuff, we will simply show you what we are working on. Follow us on either YouTube or Facebook for (hopefully) regular video updates.
Our overall goal going forward is to improve the local multiplayer experience as much as we can with the time we can afford to spend on Lance A Lot (before we must move on to our next project), and to get the game released on console. It’s coming to Xbox One this summer, and it may be released on PS4 and Switch as well.
Furthermore, this also means that there will not be a standalone Enhanced Edition anymore. All future updates will simply be patched directly into the current game. We also want to add support for Mac and Linux as well, but we can’t promise anything yet.
Again, we are sorry to disappoint you regarding online. But with the limited time we have, we prefer to focus on improving local multiplayer and getting the game out on consoles, rather than to spread our efforts thin and attempt more than we can finish. And we would rather make a great local multiplayer game, than a mediocre online game.
We hope that this isn’t too disappointing.
Regardless, we are very sorry to that we cannot deliver on our promise.
tldr; online multiplayer in our development build has fundamental network issues that would take too much time to fix (need to rewrite lots of physics/movement code, and redesign core gameplay). Therefore we have decided to cancel online multiplayer permanently for Lance A Lot. We are sorry to disappoint you.
EDIT: Shortened the text, it was unnecessarily long.
EDIT #2 (March 29 2017): Changed title to "Online cancelled" from "We're sorry". We're still sorry, but this makes it clearer what the post is about.